I have made a decision to alter and/or remove various restrictions on Voat. I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s something both @Atko and I believe needs to be reevaluated.
Voat has always had a problem with spam. @Amalek would spam posts and hijack the new queue making it unusable. MH101 and then later @SaneGoatiSwear would hijack comment pages making them unusable. The rules Voat uses were put in place in to combat this behavior. They are old rules, mostly remaining unchanged from the initial versions of this site. Most, if not all, of the rules were in direct response to spam attacks. It was never Voat’s intention to limit non-spam accounts, but this is what has happened as an indirect result of these rules.
Voat will not keep in place a system that permanently limits a segment of users from debating and conversing. This isn’t Free Speech as I see it or as I want it.
Voat will shortly be going live with a new code base, and I want to have a new system designed and ready for when this happens, so I am posting this announcement to get feedback from the community.
The main areas of concern:
- Commenting restrictions on negative CCP accounts that aren't spamming their comments
- Limiting any account that spam comments
TL;DR
We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.
How do we do it?
All options are on the table
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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10246452? ago
Proposal: limitations are removed or lessened for users with negative CCP, but their names show up in a color indicating that there's a greater chance they're a detractor from the site. This would remove limitations for most, but could end up punishing some unlucky few (who happen to have unpopular opinions on enough topics to be downvoted). The benefit, however, would be that negative CCP ends up being like pink hair on an SJW: Aposematism, a warning to others.
10246673? ago
A stylish suggestion, but I don't like it. The problem is that negative CCP does not come about only because of spam. In fact it most commonly comes about from people with ideas or opinions that most of Voat disagrees with, or just all around annoying folks. As annoying as they may be, the extent to which they are annoying, or their opinions, should not be grounds for restricted speech in any way at all. Putt is considering implementing new features to tackle this issue, and so we as a community can make use of spam reporting features and flagging teams or something along those lines instead of relying on groupthink and popularity votes. We need something more accountable.